Patrick Sun
Senior HTF Member
- Joined
- Jun 30, 1999
- Messages
- 39,669
Porting over letterboxed LDs to DVDs: It's pretty straight forward to capture the LD video to an AVI file and crunch it up so that it can be transferred to a blank DVD. Now, just for fun and giggles, has anyone tried porting to a 16x9-coded DVD?
I know I won't gain anymore resolution, but if you have a 16x9 TV, watching a letterboxed DVD with a 4:3 aspect ratio does bring up some viewing decisions (either turn on the pillar mode to keep the aspect ratio correct, or stretch it) if you don't have a DVD player that can scale non-anamorphic letterbox DVDs.
So this exercise is to avoid that if possible by creating a 16x9 DVD out of a non-anamorphic source.
(Feel free to skip this part below because I had better success skipping the part of using VirtualDub to crop and IVTC the file, and go to this post for a better way to achieve the results.)
What I've been doing (my latest encoding attempt is still getting crunched up as I type) is take the original AVI files that was captured from the LD. For 125 minutes, its AVI file is around 27GB, at 720x480 resolution. I use VirtualDub's Null Transform filter to crop 60 lines from the top and 60 lines from the bottom to create an AVI file with 720x360 resolution, but for some reason, the new AVI file size blows up to around 45GB (But I digress).
Once I have the new AVI file, I then use TMPGEnc to encode the AVI file into a M2V file for the video portion for the DVD. I did some tests to see which settings created the "right" looking file with 720x480 resolution (where people look taller and skinner until the anamorphic squeeze or full mode is applied to anamorphically-encode files), which is needed for the DVD spec, at 29.97 fps. I use 2-pass VBR with a bitrate around 4500 for a running time of 125 minutes.
Once I create the M2V file, multiplex it with the AC3 I made earlier, and used DVD Author to create the menu, create the files for the DVD.
Then I use IFOEdit to change the video flag from 4:3 to 16x9 and save that *.ifo file and then burn it to a blank DVD.
I think this should work, but was just wondering if others have already gone through this process, and if I should be doing something else to get the most video quality out of the encoding process.
I know I won't gain anymore resolution, but if you have a 16x9 TV, watching a letterboxed DVD with a 4:3 aspect ratio does bring up some viewing decisions (either turn on the pillar mode to keep the aspect ratio correct, or stretch it) if you don't have a DVD player that can scale non-anamorphic letterbox DVDs.
So this exercise is to avoid that if possible by creating a 16x9 DVD out of a non-anamorphic source.
(Feel free to skip this part below because I had better success skipping the part of using VirtualDub to crop and IVTC the file, and go to this post for a better way to achieve the results.)
What I've been doing (my latest encoding attempt is still getting crunched up as I type) is take the original AVI files that was captured from the LD. For 125 minutes, its AVI file is around 27GB, at 720x480 resolution. I use VirtualDub's Null Transform filter to crop 60 lines from the top and 60 lines from the bottom to create an AVI file with 720x360 resolution, but for some reason, the new AVI file size blows up to around 45GB (But I digress).
Once I have the new AVI file, I then use TMPGEnc to encode the AVI file into a M2V file for the video portion for the DVD. I did some tests to see which settings created the "right" looking file with 720x480 resolution (where people look taller and skinner until the anamorphic squeeze or full mode is applied to anamorphically-encode files), which is needed for the DVD spec, at 29.97 fps. I use 2-pass VBR with a bitrate around 4500 for a running time of 125 minutes.
Once I create the M2V file, multiplex it with the AC3 I made earlier, and used DVD Author to create the menu, create the files for the DVD.
Then I use IFOEdit to change the video flag from 4:3 to 16x9 and save that *.ifo file and then burn it to a blank DVD.
I think this should work, but was just wondering if others have already gone through this process, and if I should be doing something else to get the most video quality out of the encoding process.